Book Reviews 995

does not deduce reality from reasoning processes.. . then Scheler might concur with
Levinas regarding that most powerful source of resistance evoking and preceding
language and reason-the irreducible Other’ (p. 160). We should recognise, however, that
Levinas’ account of the ‘face’ of the Other entails a more radical displacement of the
traditional ways to constitute meaning by championing alterity. Though Barber has taken
the right step in seeking an ally with Levinas, it seems doubtful that Scheler’s way of
accenting the Other could yield the same radical implications as subsequent thinkers have
shown. Despite his religious orientation, Scheler could not anticipate the unbearable
suffering arising from the post-1930s catastrophe in Western Europe, which yields the
historical focus for Levinas’ phenomenological ethics. Insofar as Scheler’s ethics of love
has been forged on the teeth of modem problems (e.g. historicism, relativism, positivism),
it is difficult to attribute to him the kind of ‘dialogic ethics’ which address the crises of the
post-modern world (pp. 164-165).
Barber does an admirable job both in relieving the obscurity surrounding Scheler’s
thought and in taking the necessary step toward recovering its contemporary relevance. In
the end, Scheler’s legacy may be better served not by weighing his contributions against
post-Modernism, but by viewing him as an eclectic thinker who continues to inspire us to
address the things themselves.

Frank Schalow
Tulane University, LA

Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy, Julian Martin
(Cambridge, 1992), xiii +236 pp., $49.95 cloth.

Yet another book on Francis Bacon! Over the last few decades, numerous studies have
appeared of his political and legal life, of his language, and especially of his significance
for natural philosophy; so do we really need another? The answer is a resounding ‘Yes!‘,
since Julian Martin has successfully combined traditionally discrete disciplinary areas, to
produce an integrated study that is justifiably claimed as ‘entirely novel’.
The author’s main theses are that ‘Bacon’s legal and political career was crucial in the
creation of his natural philosophy and that his natural philosophy cannot be separated
from his political ambitions’; and his book presents a beautifully structured argument in
support of those contentions. So he first outlines the Elizabethan milieu, from which
Bacon learnt the statesman’s virtues of providing his monarch with good counsel and
advancing the ‘common weal’; and he shows how his subject early became convinced that
knowledge, as power, was a matter not simply of private, but rather of public and political
concern. The importance of Bacon’s own successful career as a lawyer is then emphasised,
and a detailed account of legal procedures enables one to see the significance of his later
proposed reforms in that area. In particular, Bacon is concerned to resist Edward Coke’s
potentially populist emphasis on common law (with its resort to past records and
associated threat to monarchical authority): rather, his own elaborate procedures re-
affirm social hierarchies and are specifically designed to reinforce the king’s supreme
control.

Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994

996 Book Reviews

It is claimed by Professor Martin that this ‘elitist’ approach to law then serves as a
model for Bacon’s proposed reform of natural philosophy: that is, the whole is again
aimed at underpinning monarchical authority, and the procedures advocated in the case
of law are deliberately paralleled in his approach to natural philosophy. The concluding
chapter in which these parallels between legal and ‘scientific’ procedures are drawn, is
something of an intellectual tour deforce: building on his earlier foundations, the author
shows how the meanings of such traditionally problematic words in Bacon-studies as
‘experiment’ and ‘induction’, are illuminated by their revealed usage in legal studies; and
the significance of other terms used in Baconian natural philosophy-including ‘torture’,
‘witnesses’, ‘facts’, and ‘tables’ -is similarly clarified by reference to analogies in law. And
the point of the whole ‘Great Instauration’ is, again, to enable the monarch to remain
supreme and, with ordinary people kept in ignorance, to use his new-found knowledge for
the political goal of imperial expansion. Benjamin Farrington must be turning in his
grave: far from appearing as a Marxist hero, Bacon is here displayed as a self-confessed
‘perfect and peremptory royalist’, who would have been more pleased at his own adoption
by Louis XIV than by those Puritan revolutionaries with whom he has more often been
historically associated.
Clearly many questions are provoked by Julian Martin’s thesis. For example, how are
we to evaluate Bacon’s private papers in which his objectives are claimed to have been
most clearly stated? Why in particular should we accept at face value the political
motivations he expresses in a letter to his king, while rejecting as unserious his more public
avowals of millenarian enthusiasm? No doubt there will be many who wish further to
challenge Professor Martin’s revisionist account. But any such will need to arm
themselves with an equally formidable array of interdisciplinary learning, and that may
take some time.
I guarantee anyway that all readers of this clearly-written and well-presented book will
need to reconsider their interpretation of William Harvey’s notorious criticism of Bacon,
that he wrote philosophy ‘like a Lord Chancellor’: to me, that now sounds less like an
insult, more like a truism; for I have been persuaded that Bacon was indeed concerned
with (in his own words) ‘making the government of the world a mirror for the government
of a state’.

Beverley Southgate
University of Hertfordshire. UK

Marxism and Democracy, Joseph V. Femia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 187 pp.
H.B., n.p.g.

This is an admirably clear book which presents the various strands in Marxism’s
critiques of liberal democracy and its accounts of a democratic alternative. The outline of
the book and its central argument in the introductory chapter is a reliable guide to the
remainder; but the author’s claim to originality seems exaggerated. The merits of the book
lie in clarity and conciseness of exposition in well-trodden ground, not in having finally
discovered some fundamental weakness in Marxism.
Femia usefully organises Marxist criticisms of liberal democracy into two forms:

History of European Ideas